


this problem lies in me

by watfordbird33



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adults, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Monsters, Neighbors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 12:45:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15437340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watfordbird33/pseuds/watfordbird33
Summary: Sixteen peace offerings and a monster.





	this problem lies in me

**Author's Note:**

> Emerging from a months-long writer's block took me a whole lot of luck, a whole lot of tears, and a whole lot of wonderful people. Thank you eternally to M (for your cheerleading and sympathy), K (for the gargoyles), and C (for planting the first seed). 
> 
> Title taken from the Imagine Dragons song "Monster".

There was a monster in Lily’s closet.

She stood looking at it for a long time: the broad scaly neck, the toothy mouth, the way its tail flicked idly at its side. It was awful and slimy and green, exactly like the storybook beasts. As she watched, it took her best dress between its yellowed jaws and began to worry away the hem.

“No,” she said, out loud.

To acknowledge the thing—verbally, tangibly—was to acknowledge insanity, but she couldn’t help it. That dress was the nicest thing she owned. She had worn it to graduation under her robes and then to Grad Night Out with a strapless bra that she had to keep hiking up surreptitiously so it wouldn’t fall right off her chest. That dress had  _ worth.  _ It had  _ memories. _

The monster blinked at her.

“Get out,” she told it, pointing firmly towards the window.

Its great golden eye widened, then slitted in a parody of her own narrow glare. The monster spit the edge of her dress out, a low noise rumbling in its throat.

Was it—?

No. It couldn’t be.

Lily slammed the closet door. Even her imagination was laughing at her.

  


Later, James Potter came to her door—the eighth time this week. He wore a pair of distressed jeans, and a T-shirt with Joni Mitchell’s face printed rather haphazardly across it.

“I can’t deal with you right now,” Lily said. She had only opened the door a crack, partially because she wanted to discourage conversation as much as possible, and partially because she didn’t want him to see the mess of laundry and takeout boxes that littered her floor. “Please go away.”

“I brought flowers,” James Potter said. She thought of him that way; James Potter. Marlene called him Potter, and all his friends called him James, but to her he was a full name. A full name to match a full set of muscles and a fully intact ability to drive her insane. Flowers?

She was too exhausted to even phrase it as a question. “Why the fuck did you bring flowers.”

“As a peace offering.”

“I don’t  _ like  _ flowers.”

“You’ll like these.”

She deliberated. Best to take them and have him out of here as soon as possible? Her stubborn streak won. It always did. “No, I won’t,” she said, and closed the door.

  


She expected him to leave after a few rounds of knocking, but it was half an hour later and he was still leaning on the bell.

“So help me, God,” she said, flinging open the door. At this point she was past such petty concerns as whether or not James Potter thought she kept good house. She snatched the flowers ( _ lilies,  _ fuck him) from his hands and chucked them backwards into the living room.  _ “Go.” _

He went, meekly enough. When he had gone, she gathered the crumpled lilies and looked for a card. There was none. Upon further examination—several rearrangements and a lot of squinting—she found he had written his message directly on the flowers, dark Sharpie staining the petals. 

_ i’m Sorry evans Please Forgive me for Whatever I did xoxo James.  _

  


The monster was still there. It snapped at her when she tried to extract her dress—now gnawed thoroughly from the scoop-neck to the flare of the waistline—but it ate James Potter’s lilies cheerfully enough. She watched it eat in a kind of horrified fascination. Regardless of scales and slime, it was tidy and neat.

“Am I going crazy?” she asked it.

It didn’t answer, which was reassuring enough. Instead it shifted on its perch and bit a hanger in half. One of the nice ones, from Nordstrom. For some reason, this was the final straw. She covered her eyes and backed away from the closet. She thought she might be sick.

  


She stayed inside for another week. James Potter didn’t come once. She could hear him next door, puttering around in his garden and singing Queen in a high, trembling tenor, and when she was really tired, that made her feel safe. When she was lucid, she thought about throwing something out the upstairs window at him.

The monster screamed if she closed the closet door, so she left it open. After a few days, it emerged from the closet and tottered down the stairs. It sat across from her at the table and chuckled to itself and in spite of all she’d been warned about as a child, she gave it a bit of Chinese takeout and a fork. 

On Friday, she started talking to it in earnest. It drowned out the sound of James’s singing and made her feel, somehow, a little less lonely. She hadn’t realized until she began talking to the thing how truly lonely she’d been feeling. 

There was no one else to judge, so she told it about her and James Potter.

  


James Potter, who thought you didn’t have to separate the darks from the lights in the laundry. James Potter, with his six-pack abs. James Potter, who had brought her a different gift each day of last week—twice on Sunday—one after the other after the other, eight “peace offerings” in all.

“Fucker,” Lily said, feelingly, to the monster.

It cooed understandingly and she gave it another sushi roll. At this rate she’d be out of the salmon before she’d even gotten a bite.

“I knew it would be  _ disastrous,”  _ she tried to explain, “to fall for him.”

Disastrous. And yet falling for him was exactly what she had done.

If she was being honest, it wasn’t really the falling that had been so terrible. The falling had actually been quite nice. She’d taught him how to do his laundry, and then they’d fallen asleep at the laundromat, his head on her shoulder, the washing machine humming happily at their backs with its double load of bras and boxers. He’d made her a gooey casserole. She’d danced to Taylor Swift in his kitchen with the bass jacked up so all the pots and pans he had hanging from his ceiling jerked and clanged around. They’d watched countless movies; him draped lazily across the couch, her with her knees drawn up to her chest, ready with a blanket for the scary parts. He’d taken care of her when she was sick.

No, she thought,  _ that _ hadn’t been so terrible. The terrible part had come when she’d woken at one in the morning two weeks ago, the ending to the fantasy trilogy they were writing crystal-clear in her mind. She’d stumbled into her bathrobe and flip-flops, too excited to care about her loose breasts or messy hair. After all, he’d woken her at three in the morning a few nights before, wild-eyed and slightly drunk and insisting she had to watch the latest episode of Stranger Things, right now, right  _ now,  _ dammit, Lils. So he wouldn’t mind.

The monster looked worried at this part of the story.

“Yeah,” she said, chopsticks poised. “It took a  _ long _ time for him to come to the door, but he came.”

And with him, a girl. A pretty, slender, red-haired, green-eyed, long-limbed nymph of a girl. Half-clad.

_ What’s wrong, Evans?  _ James had said sleepily. 

And even then. Even then, it hadn’t seemed like he was bothered by her. Like he was annoyed by her antics, her shenanigans. Because he was perfect and wonderful and had a great body and loved literally everyone in the world.

But he hadn’t loved her the way she wanted him to. No—instead he was having his hot James Potter sex and his hot James Potter love life with this beautiful, awful girl.

Lily had burst into tears. That had actually been the okayest part of everything, just because it made the Lily-clone look so uncomfortable. 

  


“And now,” Lily said, taking the last salmon roll before the monster could snatch it, “now,  _ he _ wants to apologize to _ me.” _

The monster burped in sympathy.

“Tell me.” Lily swallowed. There was a lump in her throat that had been there for about two weeks. It felt like an apology, all corked up, but whenever she opened her mouth and faced James Potter, only bitterness came out. “Tell me,” she said again, taking a swig of sake, “what am I supposed to do about a man like that?”

  


James Potter was at the door again. He carried a platter of items that resembled cookies if Lily gave them the benefit of a lot of doubts.

“Chocolate chip. No raisins.”

Lily stared at him.

“Let’s talk,” he said. He pressed the platter into her arms and ducked past her into the hallway, already reaching for his shoes. By the time she’d gathered herself enough to put the cookies down and order him out of her house, he was shoeless and padding purposefully up the hallway in a pair of Disney princess socks.

“I don’t want to talk.”

“Talking’s important, Evans.” Mulan winked encouragingly at Lily from James’s socked heel. “Take a cookie. I slaved over those. It’s ninety degrees and I didn’t want my oven on in ninety degrees.”

“Then you shouldn’t have made them,” Lily snapped, horribly conscious of her ratty lounge pants and sweat-gelled hair. There was something about James Potter that made her want to be wearing pearls. Unfortunately the monster had eaten her strand of costume pearls last week, furious over not being allowed to watch Riverdale with her downstairs.

James was optimistic. “You don’t mean that.” He made himself at home in her kitchen: opening a window, pushing aside a pizza box so he could take a seat on one of Lily’s bar stools. His shirt rode up when he sat down, and Lily tried not to notice. “If you don’t want one, I’ll have one.”

Lily went and got the cookies and put them on the counter in front of him. He ate three. When he was done, he propped his elbow up and looked at her.

“What?” she said, uncomfortable.

He sighed. “Can you at least tell me what I did?”

Lily thought about saying it. Thought about how the truth would taste under her tongue. Rancid, probably. Burnt and gooey like one of James’s casseroles.  _ You screwed a girl,  _ she imagined herself saying—but no, that wasn’t exactly right. James did not screw, or fuck _.  _ He  _ made love.  _ He engaged in  _ sexual intercourse.  _ He performed the  _ delicate dance of copulation. _

She tried again.  _ You performed  _ the delicate dance of copulation _ with a girl who wasn’t me.  _

Or,  _ How many of your grand pre-romance romantic gestures did you ever actually mean? _

He’d held her hand, for God’s sake. He’d held her hand while singing I Want To Hold Your Hand, which was terrible and wonderful and cringeworthy and for some reason had made her want to cry.

“Fine,” James Potter said now, when she didn’t end up saying anything of what was in her head. “Fine, then; can we just forget it?”

This seemed too easy. “Forget it?”

He dropped his head into his hands, gusted a sigh. “Goddammit, Evans. I miss you.”

She cackled wildly. Upstairs she could hear the monster yelp in disapproval. “Please. You’re  _ fine _ . You’re fine without me.” She took a cookie, because the platter was there, and tried to ignore the unwashed bra hanging off the cabinet handle right behind his head. He probably had unwashed bras hanging all over his house, like scalps on a belt to count his conquests. “You’re an actual functioning adult,” she continued, feeling unstable; “an actual guy who has all of your little messy parts together in the shape of a human being, someone who fucking cooks and does dishes and isn’t the biggest fucking mess in the entire fucking world and it’s  _ no wonder—“ _

She stopped.

“Jesus Christ, Lily,” James said, looking shocked, “is that what you think of me?”

“James,” she said. She could feel herself starting to cry. “There’s a monster in my closet and it won’t go away.” 

  


They went upstairs together, James with the broad-bristled push broom from the garage. Lily could hear the monster squalling all the way up the stairs.

When they got to her room, the monster met them at the door, wings out, tail raised. Its black tongue speared accusingly at Lily. A measure of hot green slime dripped onto James’s hideous loafers.

“I’m not crazy,” Lily said, pointing. “Look.”

“It’s kind of cute,” James allowed. He lowered the broom and reaching out a hand to scritch behind the monster’s ears.

“You can’t  _ say that.”  _ The monster had already begun to purr, arching its long scaled back coquettishly in an approximation of  _ You’re too kind.  _ It had taken a week and a half for the monster to let Lily touch it, and yet here was James Potter draped all over it. Lily tried to reassert her superior knowledge. “You have to be firm with it. No-nonsense. I started talking to it, and look at me now.”

_ “I _ think you’re remarkably well-adjusted,” James said, gravely.

Lily snorted. “I don’t know what planet you’re living on.”

With a final scratch of the monster’s batlike ears, James stepped around the monster and fully into Lily’s bedroom. He had been there before, once, but it had only been for a few minutes, and the room had been in considerably better shape. Now there were clothes flung over the dirty desk chair and disheveled floor lamp, pizza boxes and crumpled apology notes stacked in haphazard piles throughout the room. The monster turned its head to watch James inch gingerly across the carpet to Lily’s bed. “Maybe it’s a sign,” he said.

“Maybe what’s a sign?” Lily pushed past the monster, kicking a note out of her path before James could see it. It said  _ Fuck you, you giant fucker, I love you,  _ which was just about right.

“The monster. Being here. Like a sign from some weirdass god.”

Lily had been raised Catholic, denouncing the church at nineteen after a close friend had died birthing a child she was forbidden to abort. “I think it’s a fantastical anomaly in the space-time continuum. Or we’re sharing the same high.”

James frowned, the familiar crease forming between his brows. “I don’t get high,” he said.

Lily felt panic rising in her throat. “Well, I don’t either,” she said. She could hear the shrill tone her voice was taking on, the miserable soprano of it. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t believe in a god. It just showed up, and I don’t know what to do, and now it won’t leave me alone.”

“It might just need some—” James floundered. “—love.”

“I give it _ love.  _ I talk to it. I feed it my fucking Chinese food.”

James studied the monster. “Does it really need to go? Is it actually doing any damage?”

At that, Lily sank onto the bed, suddenly overcome. Her words came out squeaky and choked.  “It—ate—my—pearls.”

James exhaled and took her in his arms. Sometime in the past half hour he had gone from being James Potter to being James. She wasn’t sure when or how that had happened. Maybe when he’d marched up from the garage shouldering the push broom, or when he’d scritched the monster’s ears, or when he’d told her she was remarkably well-adjusted. In any case, he was James, and he was holding her. She pushed her nose into his shoulder: warm deodorant and the undertone of his cat, Algernon. His shirt was made of this nice, solid fabric. In a few more minutes it would have snot all over it.

“You need a nap,” James told her, rocking her a little.

“I need a break,” Lily said. Hiccuped. “From my life.”

She felt James ready himself to say something—something that was going to be irritatingly sweet and comforting and perfect in every way—but instead he just inhaled in a surprised burst with such force that he started to cough. Something brushed Lily’s hair. She extracted herself from James’s heaving shoulder and met the monster’s golden gaze head-on; it was half a foot from her, its ugly foreleg extended towards her head. 

“Graaah,” it said softly.

Lily froze. “What’s it doing?”

“It wants to help,” James said, recovering himself. He was watching the monster, his hazel eyes wide behind his glasses. “Look at it. It feels bad.”

The monster began to stroke her hair.

“I think I’m having a breakdown,” Lily said. She held very still. The monster petted her hair away from her forehead and ran its narrow, careful claws down the back of her neck. With its other foreleg, it rubbed deft circles into the small of her back. After a moment, it hopped onto the bed beside James and eased Lily onto its lap. She didn’t resist much. She was too afraid that it would bite her. “Is this happening?”

James’s mouth twisted in amusement. “It’s adopted you.”

This was too much. “I don’t  _ want _ it.” Lily struggled. The monster clucked in a concerned sort of manner, but let her writhe free of its grip and stagger to her feet. She supposed she looked a fright. “Enough,” she told it, “okay? Out.” She took the push broom from where it leaned against her bedpost, then glared towards James. “Open the window.”

“But—”

_ “James. _ Open the window.”

James opened the window. As Lily hefted the broom, the monster squawked in disbelief, backing towards where the breeze was sifting in. 

“There, there,” Lily said through gritted teeth, jabbing the broom forwards like a lance; “there— _ there.” _

And it was gone.

  


James left after that. Lily couldn’t blame him, really. 

  


Without the monster, the house felt sort of empty. This didn’t make any sense, because Lily had been just fine before it had shown up. Now, though, the rooms gaped, cavernous. She watched an episode of Stranger Things in the basement and had to sleep down there because she was too afraid to venture back upstairs.

James stopped singing in the garden, too, which didn’t help with the loneliness. She didn’t see him much. The day after she’d pushed the monster out the window, she slipped around the side of her house into his yard to search for the body, but she found none. All that was left of the monster was a single acid-green feather, dripping with tepid slime. Lily took it inside and then sat for a long time on her front porch, watching James’s bedroom window. Once, the curtain twitched.

  


She cleaned the house. It took a day or two, but she recycled every takeout box, took her soiled clothes to the laundromat, and vacuumed the carpets so thoroughly they were warm for hours afterwards.  

She realized with some surprise that, apart from the aching rooms and the persistent memory of James Potter falling asleep on her shoulder, she was fine. She felt sort of well-adjusted, even. Her kitchen was clean, and she baked a cake in it. Since there was no monster to eat half of it, she ate the whole thing herself. In fairness, it was a small cake, and she did push-ups when she was done. 

She put on makeup. She waited at the door, pretending to straighten things on the walls so if James knocked, she would hear him. There was a mirror next to the door, and she admired her lipstick in it. It was odd, she thought, without really paying too much attention to the thought, that even though she had an undefinable hole in her heart, she felt the best she ever had.

  


A week after ridding herself of the monster, Lily baked another cake and took it to James’s door.

“Peace offering number one,” she said, when he opened the door.

He blinked at her. Frankly, he looked awful. His glasses were pushed onto his forehead, strands of matted hair tangled in the frames. There was a streak of some sort of sauce on his cheek, and dark circles underneath his eyes. “Lily,” he said. His voice was wrong: too high. “You look great.”

She studied him worriedly. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong—I—” He scrubbed a hand back through his hair, making his propped-up glasses slip and then fall. They hung from one ear, swinging. He made no attempt to replace them. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just dealing with—no. No. It’s fine. Thank you for the cake.”

“James,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

He shook his head.

“I want to tell you—”

“My casserole needs to come out,” he interrupted, with an odd, queasy smile, and shut the door. 

It was strange to be on the other side of such a clear rejection. Lily stood flabbergasted for a second on the doorstep before she turned around and marched back to her house. 

  


Peace offering number two: a music box that played Africa by Toto, which James claimed was the greatest song to ever grace the charts.

Peace offering number three: a pair of socks with chinchillas on them.

Peace offering number five: a cookbook dedicated solely to wonderful chocolatey things.

Peace offering number seven: eleven daffodils.

James didn’t open the door for peace offering number eight, not even after Lily had leaned on the bell for a couple of minutes—and he had a really, really annoying bell. Lily looked at the letter in her hand. She would have liked to deliver it in person, but it couldn’t be helped. She dropped the letter on his welcome mat and weighed it down with a couple of pearly rocks.

She was halfway back to her house when she heard the unmistakable swish of the door opening. For a second resentment burned hot and painful through her— _ why did he wait for me to leave? _ —and then she swung around. She couldn’t help it. He was holding the letter, the rocks in his other hand, and looking at her across the lawn.

“I was  _ dealing with something,”  _ he said, like he had been deeply wounded. “Can you come inside?”

  


She went inside. They sat at the table in the kitchen, and she noticed the chocolate cookbook propped on the shelf beside his stove. The daffodils were in a vase on the counter. There was a cleared-out radius around them, like a bomb site, and then the mess took over. Socks and plastic wrap and burnt casserole pans covered every inch of what should have been an impeccably clean kitchen.

“Should I read this now?” he asked her, brandishing the letter.

She wasn’t sure. Clearing a space for herself on the window seat, she sat, considering. Probably she should just tell him, but that seemed like a lot, right now. “Sure.”

He read it. While he read, she looked at the ceiling and tried to figure out what the desperate, rhythmic thumping emanating from the upper floor could be. His cat was mighty, but it was also very small. Perhaps he had cleaners. She hoped he had cleaners.

“Oh, Lils,” he said, when he had finished the letter.

“If you’re going to reject me,” she said, “can you do it all at once?”

He thumbed his lip and looked at her, a piercing James Potter look that was distinctly uncomfortable. There was something in his eyes that had not been there a week ago. 

“She wasn’t anybody,” he said, predictably enough. “I wish you’d told me.”

“And then—what? You wouldn’t have slept with her?”

_ “No.”  _ He was frustrated now. “No, I wouldn’t have. Because. Because—”

The thumping increased, and he stopped, glancing at the ceiling.

“What is that?” Lily said, distracted enough not to pursue his  _ because. _

“Nothing.”

“Algernon?”

The cat came into the kitchen just then, like it had been summoned, stopping in front of the oven to preen and lick its fur. The thumping continued. James blanched. 

“James,” Lily said. 

“I couldn’t just  _ leave it there.” _

A horrible sinking realization drilled its way into her chest. “You didn’t—”

“Look—”

“It’s not your responsibility to take care of it.” She gestured to the kitchen, the pans, the general war-zone feeling of the place. “Look at this! Look at what it’s doing to you.”

“Lily,” he said. “You should go.”

The thumping intensified, and Lily got to her feet. She made it halfway to the stairs before James caught her, placing the whole bulk of his hard, muscular body between her and the door. He smelled like sweat and old pizza and weariness. She shoved against him; broke through; got to the stairs again before he cornered her. God, but he was stupid fast.

“It’s mine,” she told him, pushing ineffectually at his chest. 

“You said you didn’t want it.”

“I  _ don’t  _ want it, but it’s mine, you idiot. I need to take care of it. That’s why it showed up. It’s not a fucking sign from God, it’s not something special you get points for having—it’s a fucking  _ burden,  _ James. It’s a burden and it’s mine to bear.”

His face was taut and frustrated. “Don’t be noble.”

“I’m not being noble. I’m trying to stop  _ you _ from being noble.”

He stepped aside like he’d been slapped, and she charged up the stairs before he could change his mind. At the top, she followed the sound of the thumping to the far door. His bedroom. She leaned against the door for a moment before she pushed it open, and then the monster was there in front of her, spitting, its back legs pawing at the ground. 

“I can’t settle it down,” James said from behind her.

She stepped forward and the monster calmed a little, watching her, its golden eyes flared wide. It had left piles of monster-shit all over James’s room, even on the scarlet duvet they’d wrap themselves in to watch Stranger Things. She touched its nose, then the line of its neck, then the winged scapula, where the scales started. Slime fell in hissing droplets to her shoes.

The monster leaned its head towards her, very slowly. She stood dead still until it had lowered its muzzle to her shoulder, and then she put her arm around its neck. The familiar ugly weight dropped into her heart like a stone, plugging a gap she hadn’t known was there. 

  


She installed the monster in her closet again. It picked up right where it had left off, gnawing the strings of her favorite Montauk hoodie into shriveled strands. 

The mess began to redouble in earnest. Even the first day, there were clothes everywhere, scattered across the floor, lumped in uneven piles on her furniture. The monster purred and begged for attention and ate her Indian food. She only had enough energy to wash a dish or two before she went upstairs and sank into the sweet relief of sleep. 

  


James came the second day. She wasn’t going to let him in, but after jabbing his elbow into the bell for a while, he started actually yanking on the knob. The door shuddered so much Lily was afraid one of the neighbors would call the police on him.

He came in wordlessly, brushing by her, and went down on hands and knees to begin clearing the floor. As he scooped up each piece of trash, he fed it to the monster, which sat perched on one of Lily’s bar stools, combing its dripping wings. After a while, Lily, shocked dumb, crouched heavily down beside him to help.

“No,” he said, turning to her—the first word he’d spoken. “If you keep the monster, I do this.”

She gaped at him.

“You can’t do it alone,” he said, and reached for another shirt.

  


She let him clean the floor, then sort her laundry, then cook her a casserole she could cut into portions and freeze. She ate two helpings sitting at the counter, the monster begging for scraps at her knee. When she was done, James led her upstairs, pushed the monster into the closet, and got pajamas out for her.

“I don’t think we finished talking,” he said, once she had emerged from the bathroom, freshly flannel-clad.

“Finished—” Realization hit her. She sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

He eased himself onto the mattress beside her, hazel eyes concerned behind his glasses. “I wouldn’t have slept with her.”

“You said that.”

“Yeah, but I said—I—look, I wouldn’t have slept with her because I would have slept with you.”

Lily’s head hurt. She looked at the closet, where the monster was tapping its long flexible claws against the door. The wood buckled a little, familiarly. She thought she might be dreaming, as she could have sworn she had just heard James Potter tell her he’d have liked to sleep with her. (That was what he did. He  _ slept  _ with people. That captured the sexy romance of it perfectly. As if all he did was roll into bed and wake up glowing and post-coitally flushed.) “Then why’d you do it?” she said, more sharply than she meant to.

“Because I make mistakes. Because I didn’t want to mess up what we had. Because I didn’t think you felt the same.”

Lily felt a sob welling up in her throat. “You’re so stupid,” she said. “Like, you’re literally the most stupid person on the planet. You thought my fucking mental illness was a fucking sign from God.”

“I’m just a lot more optimistic than you.”

“God, I hate you.” 

But she meant  _ I love you.  _ Like it said on the note she hadn’t sent:  _ Fuck you, you giant fucker, I love you.  _

“I know,” he said. He was looking at her, and behind him the monster had gone quiet, soothed. She remembered how he had walked into her bedroom with the push broom and scratched the monster’s ears. “Me too.”  



End file.
